Covid WhatsApp scandal: Nicola Sturgeon looks more vampire than saint as she hides messages from inquiry's attempt to cast light on pandemic response – John McLellan

Former First Minister’s angry denial of using the Covid pandemic for political gain has been exposed as the guff many suspected it to be all along

How the nation shook its head with collective disdain at the confusion behind Boris Johnson’s response to the unfolding Covid crisis, WhatsApp messages from the likes of Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, revealed by the Covid Inquiry, exposing the chaos in Number 10 in gruesome detail.

Meanwhile in Bute House, Nicola Sturgeon was a tower of strength, an inspirational contrast steering a steadfast course through the crisis with the sole aim of saving of lives. Who could blame her for wanting us to continue believing the hype, that she was, according to her statement released late on Saturday afternoon, “motivated only, and at all times, by the determination to keep people as safe as possible”.

Whatever her claims now, such records as still exist show this to be bunkum, because thanks to the Covid inquiry, we now know from Ms Sturgeon’s Cabinet minutes of June 20, 2020, that it was agreed the case for independence should be updated with arguments “reflecting the experience of the coronavirus crisis”. Yet the same day on her daily Covid BBC TV broadcast, she declared with customary abrasion that anybody “trotting out political or constitutional arguments is in the wrong place, completely and has found themselves completely lost…”

Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson's handling of the Covid pandemic appears to have been equally chaotic and embarrassing (Picture: Duncan McGlynn/Getty Images)

As chaotic as Johnson’s Downing Street

It turns out the only people lost are those who still believe her, and she has only herself to blame that her weekend rebuttal about the deletion of her WhatsApp messages is now being dismissed as a deflection from what looks like an orchestrated attempt to put embarrassing evidence of the SNP’s politicisation of the pandemic beyond the public inquiry. Ms Sturgeon knew what was coming. It didn’t need private messages to prove Ms Sturgeon was a very different leader to Mr Johnson, but from what little we know, it already appears the goings on in the Scottish Government were every bit as chaotic and embarrassing. Just without the swearing.

Her propensity to take critics for fools was evident in her statement’s claim on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “the Inquiry does have messages between me and those I most regularly communicated with through informal means”, as if no one would notice that the word “all” was conspicuous by its absence. “Although these had not been retained on my own device, I was able to obtain copies which I submitted to the Inquiry last year,” she added.

But the inquiry heard on Friday that her deputy throughout the pandemic, John Swinney, either manually deleted his messages or used an auto-delete function. It also saw a transcript of a message from national clinical director, Jason Leitch, who led the Scottish Government’s medical response, at least from a public relations point of view, which said "WhatsApp deletion is a pre-bed ritual". If it was just a joke amongst colleagues not intended for further dissemination, it’s not so funny now.

It means no WhatsApp messages between Ms Sturgeon, Mr Swinney or Professor Leitch are recoverable because, as she also claimed in her statement, “I was not a member of any WhatsApp groups.” But she also said that she did use “informal messaging”, which it’s stretching credibility to accept did not include communications between the three most important people in the Scottish Government’s Covid response.

“I conducted the Covid response through formal processes from my office in St Andrews House, not through WhatsApp or any other informal messaging platform,” she insisted, without saying there were no messages at all. We’ll probably never know because inquiry counsel Jamie Dawson KC said she appeared to "have retained no messages whatsoever”, and when she gives evidence in the next week, her infamously unreliable memory is unlikely to provide much except selective claims of an unstinting devotion to duty.

Sturgeon kept some WhatsApps

Perhaps that memory doesn’t stretch back to a Sky News interview in October 2020 in which Ms Sturgeon was asked by presenter Sophie Ridge to clarify when she knew about the allegations of sexual misconduct against her predecessor Alex Salmond and whether information she released to the inquiry which followed his acquittal had been incomplete, which sounds strikingly familiar. According to the book Break-Up, the exhaustive account of the Salmond-Sturgeon psychodrama by political journalists Kieran Andrews and David Clegg, she appeared ready for the line of questioning and read out WhatsApp messages with Mr Salmond live on air, to show they didn’t contain important details.

Yet the messages related to discussions in early 2018, so retaining correspondence going back two years didn’t seem to be the problem it is now. It seems very strange that messages relating to something as serious as allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape against a former First Minister ─ which went right to the heart of the Scottish Government when she was his deputy ─ should be retained, but pandemic messages erased. Or did the fact that only the latter would be the subject of a public inquiry concentrate minds?

Maybe nothing vital has been hidden or destroyed, but it is not for those doing the deleting to judge what is important. Knowing an inquiry would be held, there should never have been any question about the need to maintain records of all communications, especially as we now know Ms Sturgeon’s angry denial of using the pandemic for political gain was the guff it was always suspected to be by everyone except gullible supporters.

From the reaction on X to Ms Sturgeon’s statement, it is clear more than a few still believe she is a living saint – “You led us through the pandemic with courage and strength”, “We new (sic) you did all you could to keep all safe”, “You were my family’s lighthouse throughout”, and, oddly, “You kept thousands safe, not only in Scotland but in England and Wales”.

Far from saintliness, the snark and aggression towards legitimate questions, the disappearance of information and the tricksy rebuttals, her aversion to sunlight is more like that of a vampire.